[ILUG] replicating ubuntu installations

[Stephen Shirley]

Morning,
	I was attempting to replicate an ubuntu installation last night, using
rysnc, and it took me a while to figure out where things were going
wrong, so i thought a quick post here might be useful to others. This
may well apply to debian sarge too, i don't know as i haven't used it
much yet.

Here's what i was doing:
1) Went to single user mode in the ubuntu installation i wanted to copy.
2) Re-mounted / read-only to prevent any funnyness
3) ran 'rsync -avx / /mnt/new' where the partition i wanted to replacte
onto was mounted at /mnt/new

However, when i attempted to boot off the new copy, i got weird errors,
telling me that /dev/null and /dev/initctrl didn't exist. After
scratching my head for a while, i decided to boot off an ubuntu live cd,
and see was i missing something.

As it turns out, i was. When ubuntu is up and running, udev is mounted
at /dev. Before udev starts and is mounted, /dev still has to contain
the basic device files (see /dev/null and /dev/initctrl ,-). Because i
was initially copying / when booted off that installation, udev was
already mounted, and rsync was then igoring it due to -x (which means
don't cross mount-points).

So, here's what did actually work:
1) Booted off an ubuntu live cd (tho almost any bootable cd distro
should work)
2) Mounted the appropriate parititons to /mnt/old and /mnt/new
3) Ran 'rsync -avx /mnt/old/ /mnt/new' (Nb: the trailing slash in
'/mnt/old/' is significant to rsync)
4) Added the appropriate entry to grub
5) There is no 5.

And bing, it now all worked.

Steve
-- 
"You are technically correct, the best kind of correct." -- the web